When you have applications running in the background, they're actively using your device's memory, and you won't know what applications are running in the background until you actually open the App Switcher and take a look.

With a new free jailbreak tweak called GlowBoard by iOS developer Elijah Frederickson, you can now make the application icons of running applications glow a certain color on your Home Screen, as shown above. This makes it so that you can easily see at a glance just how many of your applications are running in the background without the need to open the App Switcher to find out.

GlowBoard will also make application icons glow if you have unread notifications that you haven't yet looked at. Applications with pending notifications will pulse and glow so that you can see them even better. The tweak also comes with a number of customization options so you can make it work the way you want it to.

The options you will find for configuring GlowBoard are found under the GlowBoard preferences pane in the Settings application:

From here, you can configure whether Home Screen icons, Dock icons, and Folder icons (or any combination of the three) can glow when they're running in the background or have any pending notifications. You can also choose to animate the glow effect with a pulse effect, animate notifications, pick a color for applications running in the background, pick a color for applications with pending notifications, and choose whether or not Dock application icons will bounce.

The colors you can pick for the glow effect include:

White

Light White

Red

Dark

Adaptive

While most of these colors are straight forward, the "adaptive" option will make the glow color match that of the application icon. So this means that the glow color will be different for each of your application icons running in the background, or that have a pending notification if you choose this option.

GlowBoard is a really cool jailbreak tweak for anyone that likes customization and making the Home Screen more informative to the user. It works on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad and supports all versions of iOS 7 to date. If you want to give it a try, GlowBoard is available for free right now in Cydia's BigBoss repository.

I had previously been using the tweak IsRunning to show if an app was running or not, but besides the fact that it was iOS 7.1 incompatible, the fact that it wouldn't show the notification badge if the app was running in the background was annoying. I think this is a much better implementation. 5/5 from me.

I had previously been using the tweak IsRunning to show if an app was running or not, but besides the fact that it was iOS 7.1 incompatible, the fact that it wouldn't show the notification badge if the app was running in the background was annoying. I think this is a much better implementation. 5/5 from me.

I docked it the .5  because of the lack of extensive color options :P.

I docked it the .5  because of the lack of extensive color options :P.

Developer here,
The reason that we did not choose to allow full color selection is because some (many) colors either look horrendous or are very hard to see. We are open to color requests, however each color we manually edit and test to provide the optimal result for the end user.

Developer here,
The reason that we did not choose to allow full color selection is because some (many) colors either look horrendous or are very hard to see. We are open to color requests, however each color we manually edit and test to provide the optimal result for the end user.

Is it possible that could change depending on the background? Just curious if it was tested with various ranges or colors and styles.

Also, I think a cyan color would probably be nice . Thanks for the great tweak and the openness to suggestions